[ih] DNS origins?

[Kevin J Dunlap]

Namedroppers was the email list for DNS discussion.
I couldn't get mailarchive.ietf.org to go back far enought.
Here is a link that will get you the archive of Namedroppers back to March 1983.

https://marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2

RFC - 883 DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION and SPECIFICATION
Was published in November 1983.

-Kevin

Your message dated: Wed, 09 Jun 2021 13:16:25 PDT
>I remember a lengthy discussion and somewhat heated debate about the 
>design for the Internet's name system at the Internet Meeting held in 
>San Diego, IIRC at Linkabit.  Sorry, I can't remember exactly when that 
>occurred, but it was one of the "winter" meetings which were always held 
>somewhere in California.   Pretty sure it was before 1982, probably 1980/81.
>
>There were two "camps" involved in the debate.  One was arguing for 
>powerful mechanisms to handle updates of name/address mappings; the 
>other was arguing for more simplicity.
>
>I remember asking the two camps to explain what problem they were trying 
>to solve.   One camp was focussed on ARPANET-style host computers, which 
>changed their IMP ports very rarely.   Expectations were that Internet 
>addresses would change in a similar pattern. The other camp was focussed 
>on what could be called the "mobile host" problem, exemplified by the 
>various Packet Radio experiments that had been going on.   Their 
>expectation was that IP addresses might change rapidly and frequently, 
>in the heat of a battlefield operation.
>
>These were obviously very different problems, motivating very different 
>solutions.  IIRC, the debate led to the DNS implementations and specs 
>not long after that meeting in San Diego.
>
>Note that the notion of "Internet Name Server" existed before DNS - see 
>IEN 89 -- https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien89.txt  and 116 - 
>https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien116.txt
>
>I'll have to look through my old notebooks from the 80s...
>
>/Jack Haverty
>
>
>On 6/9/21 12:29 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> On 6/9/2021 11:17 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>>> Â  I remember thoughts about DNS were developed enough by summer of 
>>> 1983 that  I was asked to prepare a talk about DNS and packet radio 
>>> at what I believe was the last packet radio meeting.  Unfortunately I 
>>> don't remember what I used to learn about DNS so I could prepare my 
>>> thoughts. I remember this is where I met Jon Postel but I don't 
>>> remember if Paul Mockepetris was there.
>>
>>
>> Some additions about timeline:
>>
>>
>> I had nothing to do with the creation of any aspect of the DNS.
>>
>>
>> However RFC 822, defining Internet mail format -- with relatively 
>> small modifications from RFC 733 --as published August 1982. It 
>> included support for domain name, which is to say support for the 
>> dotted name notation in a host reference.
>>
>> SMTP also added domain name support, at the same time. (duh. Written 
>> by Jon.)
>>
>> I do not remember the details of how the directive to add this support 
>> in RFC 822 developed nor how I was told of the syntax. 822 was 
>> developed through group discussion, over email.  I don't even recall a 
>> face-to-face meeting for it.  SMTP definitely did have f2f sessions.
>>
>> I only recall one discussion with Jon, concerning the handling of 
>> domain names in SMTP, where I was confused that it always passed the 
>> entire domain name, rather than stripping off the right-hand field, as 
>> the message transited a hop.  I had not yet understood that this was 
>> not a source route.
>>
>> So I believe the general concept of the administrative/semantic 
>> hierarchy -- distinct from the distributed operational query mechanism 
>> -- was fully set by Fall of 1982.  (I'm not saying the latter wasn't 
>> but that I don't know anything about that part of the design timeline.)
>>
>> d/
>>
>
>
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